eDiscovery & Litigation Support

The Waldrep Company handles the practical middle of discovery for law firms, corporate counsel, and government attorneys: finding where electronically stored information lives, collecting it defensibly, narrowing it to what matters, and producing it the way the ESI protocol requires.

The examiner behind the work is Eric L. Waldrep, with 19 years in digital forensics and 27 years in law enforcement. That background shows in the habits. Every source is acquired with forensic tools, hash verified, and logged, so a year from now you can show exactly what was collected, when, and by what method.

Engagements start with a scoping call: which custodians, which sources, what date range, and what the discovery order actually says. You get a written collection plan and a fee estimate before any work begins.

Sources We Collect

Workstations and laptops, external drives, mobile devices, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Teams, cloud storage, and email archives. When a matter shifts from producing documents to proving what someone did with them, the same evidence supports a full digital forensics investigation.

• ESI identification and custodian data mapping
• Forensic collection with hash verification
• Chain of custody from intake through production
• Metadata preservation on every file
• Processing, deduplication, and keyword culling
• Native, PDF, TIFF, and load file productions
• Load files for Relativity and Concordance
• Meet and confer and ESI protocol consulting
• Review of opposing productions for gaps
• Declarations and testimony on methodology

The self-collection problem

It usually starts innocently. Counsel asks the client for the relevant documents, and the client drags folders onto a thumb drive, forwards some emails, and screenshots a few text threads. The production goes out. Months later, opposing counsel notices that every file carries the same created date: the day it was copied.

Now the questions change. Who decided what was responsive? What did they skip? Why do the dates not line up? Self-collection puts the party with the most at stake in charge of the evidence, and courts have sanctioned litigants for exactly that. Even when nothing was hidden, you end up spending motion practice defending your process instead of arguing your case.

A neutral examiner collecting with documented forensic methods takes that target off your back. The fight stays on the merits.

Forensic collection is not copying files

Dragging a file to a new drive is a copy, not a collection. The copy can silently change created and modified dates, break file paths, and miss anything deleted, hidden, or stored outside the folders the client thought to check.

Forensic collection works differently. The source is acquired with write protection where the media allows it, every item is hash verified against the original, and the metadata (dates, authors, senders, file paths) rides along intact. The tools log what was done and when, and that log becomes part of the record.

The difference decides arguments. When authenticity turns on when a document was written, preserved metadata is the evidence. A copied file cannot give you that.

Raw collections are big. Processing turns them into a review set you can actually work with: text and metadata are extracted, duplicates are removed across custodians, date filters are applied, and the search terms both sides negotiated get run and reported.

Culling is where the budget is won or lost. Every document cut before review is a document nobody bills to read, and on most matters the responsive set is a small fraction of what was collected. The goal is to get there without touching anything the protocol obligates you to keep.

Document production goes out in the format the case requires: native files with metadata fields, searchable PDF, TIFF with load files for Relativity or Concordance, or a mix. Bates numbering, confidentiality designations, and privilege placeholders are applied consistently, and a production log records what went out and when.

Deadline work is normal here, not an exception. If the response date is close, say so in the first call. The plan gets built backward from the day the production is due.

The cheapest discovery problems are the ones you prevent at the Rule 26(f) conference. Before you sit down with opposing counsel, it helps to know what your client's systems actually hold, what collection will realistically cost, and which of the other side's proposed search terms would bury you in noise.

Support here looks like reviewing a proposed ESI protocol before you sign it, drafting search terms narrow enough to run and broad enough to defend, and flagging the sources a draft protocol forgot. Text messages and Slack are the usual omissions.

For the meet and confer itself, technical questions can be fielded by phone in real time, so you are not agreeing to a production format or a collection method without knowing what it commits your client to.

When the other side produces, the same eye works in reverse: checking their production for stripped metadata, missing custodians, and date gaps that suggest something stayed behind.

Big firms keep litigation support departments on payroll. Most firms do not, and the discovery obligations arrive just the same. This service exists so a solo practitioner or a five-attorney shop can take an ESI-heavy case without hiring staff or learning a processing platform the week a production is due.

You bring the case strategy. The collection, processing, culling, and production mechanics happen here, with status updates in plain English and nothing produced without your sign-off. Intake is remote: devices ship overnight with chain of custody maintained, cloud sources are collected with administrator access, and travel is available when testimony requires it.

Fees are straightforward. Consulting and review time bills from $425/hr. Forensic acquisition is $1,500 per device. If the other side's expert has already filed a report you want examined, an Opposing Expert Report Review is $2,750 flat. The complete schedule is on the rates page, and if collection methodology ends up contested, expert witness testimony is available.

The first conversation is free. Call (251) 216-1164, email info@thewaldrepcompany.com, or use the contact page. Bring the case type, a rough sense of the data volume, and your deadline.